NFL finally comes to on impact of head trauma

It's been said that those who love to eat sausage might lose their interest if they took a peek behind the curtain and saw how it was made. Professional football has become America's real sports pastime in large part because its fans either don't see or, more likely, aren't concerned about each Sunday's carnage.

Spectators couldn't care less about the toll an NFL Sunday exacts on the players, and that's understandable and almost forgivable. They just want to see the gladiators perform. Who they are and what happens to them afterward is of little consequence, because there will always be other gladiators waiting in the wings.

Unfortunately, the indifference from the stands has spread upwards to the league's owners' boxes and to the NFL's executive offices on Park Avenue in New York.
For years, logic and common sense screamed that as bodies on the field got ever bigger and faster, the collisions between them would carry more impact and inflict more damage. At nearly every position, particularly on the defensive side, players are bigger and faster than they were a generation ago.

To wit, Ray Nitschke of the Green Bay Packers, considered the most fearsome middle linebacker of his time, played the game at 235 pounds. Baltimore Raven Ray Lewis, the most fearsome middle linebacker of the present day, is 15 pounds heavier and demonstrably faster than Nitschke or any of his contemporaries. Yet, the league's owners and executives have, over the decades, adopted a "What? There's gambling in Casablanca?" indifference to the result of what happens on the field.

Especially galling is the NFL's collective long-term blind eye towards the long-term effects of concussions. A Boston University study of 11 retired football players showed that each of them suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a rare ailment caused by concussive hits to the head. But league officials have consistently stonewalled and minimized similar evidence of recurring brain trauma, suggesting that there were faults in the methods of studies, or that there were other forces at work besides the hard hits themselves.

All that obfuscation changed October 28, when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was slammed about a House Judiciary Committee hearing room like a quarterback facing a blitz. Goodell was repeatedly questioned about the league's stances on how to deal with head trauma. His answers were so unsatisfactory that California Congresswoman Maxine Waters threatened to move to have the NFL's precious antitrust exemption yanked.

Since then, Goodell and the NFL have been more, shall we say, proactive and receptive. The co-chairs of the league's concussion committee resigned and the league has revamped its concussion policies, directing each of its 32 teams to hire a neurologist not previously affiliated with them. Those independent neurologists now must clear for practice or a game any player who shows a considerable sign of concussion. Tellingly, an NFL spokesman told the New York Times Monday that the league will make a sizable donation to the very Boston University center whose results it had challenged, while conceding, for the first time that concussions have consequences.

There's still much more to be done. The NFL's Competition Committee, which regulates play on the field, must mandate severe fines and suspensions for tacklers who lead with their helmets and who intentionally initiate helmet-to-helmet contact. The increased vigilance must carry over to the Pop Warner, high school and college levels, where younger players look to the professionals as role models.

Football's meat grinder will likely always extract pounds of flesh from the combatants. It's nice to know that someone finally cares about what happens to the flesh once it's ground.